This invention relates to word spotting using spoken queries.
Word spotting (which is understood to include phrase spotting, spotting of more complex linguistically-based events, and related techniques for detection of events) is a type of speech recognition in which occurrences of linguistically-based events are detected in an input acoustically-based signal. Word spotting, as well as speech recognition in general, has been performed using phonetically-based statistical models. In such word spotting systems, a query is represented in terms of phonetic units, for instance as a sequence of phonemes, which are then used to construct statistical models based on parameters associated with the phonemes.
When a query is represented in text form, it can be converted into a phonetic representation using dictionaries and/or linguistic rules. The accuracy of the phonetic representation can affect the ability of the word spotting system to detect occurrences of the query.